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Chapter 1: Who was Bayard Rustin and why is he significant?
Brazil used to have one of the fastest growing economies in the world. People called it the country of the future. There are songs. O Brasil é o país do futuro. Because it seems like we have it all, man. But then the music stopped. On the Planet Money podcast, a lot of countries these days aren't rich. They aren't poor. They're just kind of stuck in the middle. Why is that?
Chapter 2: What role did Bayard Rustin play in the civil rights movement?
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This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from NPR and ThruLine. I'm Randa Abid Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago.
Freedom Now Movement, hear me. We are requesting all citizens to move into Washington, to go by plane, by car, bus. 250,000 people. Black and white marched on the nation's capital. It nationalized the Southern freedom struggle. It was really glorious.
August 28, 1963. The March on Washington lives in many of our minds as a single moment, a single voice, a single dream.
I have a dream that one day my poor little children
But what you probably don't know is there's a man standing behind Martin Luther King Jr. as he's making this speech, just a few feet to his right. He's tall, thin, wearing thick, black-framed glasses. And this moment would never have happened without him. His name? Bayard Rustin.
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Chapter 3: How did Bayard Rustin's upbringing influence his activism?
Bayard. Bayard. Bayard. Bayard Rustin.
Today on the show, the story of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, the man behind the March on Washington. That's coming up after a quick break.
NPR's newest podcast is where you can find NPR's biggest interviews. I'm Steve Inskeep. The program is called Newsmakers. We talk with some of the most powerful and influential people at this moment to put real questions to them and push for real answers. Follow Newsmakers on the NPR app or any podcast player or you can watch on NPR's YouTube channel.
Since the beginning of this nation, we have attempted...
to make a moral and psychological analysis of prejudice, the economic and social degradation to which it has led, and I'm afraid we are still doing so.
In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement to end segregation and institutionalized racism was heating up. Sit-ins, boycotts, and marches were consuming cities across the South, a movement that was beginning to spread to northern cities too. And Bayard Rustin was a busy strategist, organizer, and political leader.
Rustin has this almost utopian idealism.
This is John D'Amelio, author of Lost Prophet, The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.
This is the world that we're aiming for. And as human beings, with our moral sense, we can move in that direction.
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Chapter 4: What were the goals of the March on Washington?
He believed an empire had been torn down and a nation changed with little more than words and peaceful protest. That was revolutionary for him. And Gandhi's voice would echo through Bayard's activism for the rest of his life.
They wanted us to talk about violence so they could destroy us. So long as we were adhering to nonviolence, they could not destroy us.
It was a viewpoint that Bayard held fast to in all of his work, and especially as he began working on something he'd been dreaming about for a long time.
A massive march directed toward and on the nation's capital. A march for jobs. For all people.
Bayard and a group of organizers presented his dream of a big march to A. Philip Randolph, a labor rights leader who was then at the center of the civil rights movement. Randolph called himself a socialist and firmly believed that a decent, well-paying job would lead to social and political freedom, especially for Black people.
For hours, they brainstormed, trying to imagine what this march would be, what its goals were, who would come, and how they would market it to the world.
January 1963. The 100 years since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation have witnessed no fundamental government action to terminate the economic subordination of the American Negro. Negroes seek, as an integral part of their own struggle as a people, the creation of more jobs for all Americans.
Therefore, the project described below must be a massive effort involving coordinated participation by all progressive sectors of the liberal, labor, religious, and Negro communities.
Walter was there for all the planning. They developed a two-day proposal.
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Chapter 5: How did the planning for the March on Washington unfold?
He changed the mission statement to include two goals.
Jobs and freedom.
Freedom, meaning racial justice. President John F. Kennedy was working on a civil rights bill, and Bayard figured the big six wouldn't want to take attention away from it. Especially since Kennedy had already made it clear he opposed the march.
He indicated that there might be violence. which would set back the cause of civil rights.
And Bayard made another tweak. He reduced the event from two days to one, and then presented the revised proposal to the Big Six. And they were on board, except Roy Wilkins of the NAACP had one condition. He didn't want Bayard Rustin, a gay former communist, to be the top organizer of the march. So it was decided that Randolph should chair the march.
He said he would do so on one condition — that he be given the right to name his deputy to do the day-to-day organizing of the march. And he named Bayard Rustin.
This wouldn't be the first time that Bayard was pushed behind the scenes. The march was announced to the world in early June of 1963. It was scheduled to take place on August 28, 1963. And then the organizing sped up.
We worked six days a week, day and night, engaging in outreach. to as many groups and people as we could. Folding letters, mailing out mailings, calling people on the phone. Because remember, we didn't have social media. We used mimeographies, we used telephones. It was like the dark ages.
Word began to spread, and they could tell people were interested in coming.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did organizers face in preparing for the march?
At the time, she was busy working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC.
There were some preachers who said it was bad luck for a woman to cross the pulpit. It was still an era where Male domination was accepted, you know.
But everyone involved in the march, from the top down, agreed on one thing. The march had to be nonviolent. Anything less could spell disaster for the movement.
Byron, I think, knew from day one that he was going to ask the New York City black policemen to volunteer as marshals. And then he proceeded. every day during the march to take a group of them out in the courtyard or back of the Friendship Building and train them in nonviolent crowd control, holding hands and encircling people should there be a disturbance.
We're nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us, but we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent with us.
And Rochelle says activists who had a more militant approach, like Malcolm X, were uninvited. Bayard knew that the march hinged on perceptions. Plenty of people were waiting for it to fail. So the crowd had to remain nonviolent. And the public face of the march also had to be nonthreatening and wildly inspirational. It had to be Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
With the march just a few weeks away, things were looking good. Everything was going according to Bayard's plan. But J. Edgar Hoover, the notoriously shady director of the FBI at the time, tried to dig up some dirt on people linked to the march. And a gay, Black socialist, former communist and conscientious objector,
How many jeopardies can you afford?
was the perfect target. And Hoover knew exactly who to pass the dirt to.
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Chapter 7: How did the media respond to Bayard Rustin's leadership?
Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one day left until the march.
It's very strange. I have a bit of amnesia about how I can't remember how I got to Washington. I think Joyce told me we flew down. We all took trains down to Washington. And we all checked into the Statler Hilton. The one person who didn't take the train down was Eleanor Holmes Norton, because Bayard felt that one person should stay behind to take any last minute calls or whatever.
What I remember mostly about that day is, you know, running around, trying to set things up. It's just a lot of people, people I'd never seen before, you know, leaders like Norm Hill. And I was, you know, just so excited whenever I saw someone from Mississippi. There was both great anticipation and also hesitancy and some fear. No one knew exactly what the numbers would be like.
It was like, we've done all the planning, now we hold our breath and see how it all comes to fruition. But there was the famous moment when Barrett came dashing through this big room that would be using at the Stadler. And he said, where's John Lewis? Get John Lewis. The fact is that John Lewis wrote a speech which was not within the guidelines of what the leadership had agreed to.
Cortland Cox had put John Lewis's speech out on the table. And all the reporters immediately got copies of it. And it hit the fan. There was a section in John's speech Something like, if violence doesn't stop, that we will have no choice but to march through the South the way General Sherman did. August 28, 1963. We woke up very early. We had breakfast at the hotel. And afterwards, we walked over
walked on the mall over to the site of the march, where there was to be a pre-march musical presentation.
I remember being there to hear Bobby.
We called Bob Dylan Bobby. And John Baez sang, as did Peter, Paul, and Mary.
We are not afraid today.
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Chapter 8: What was the impact of the March on Washington on civil rights?
We were all very ecstatic because the people were just coming in by throngs. They were singing, they were happy, and we knew it was going to be a success.
Fellow Americans, we are gathered here in the largest demonstration We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.
I have the pleasure to present to this great audience young John Lewis, National Secretary for Jobs and Freedom. In what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
The first demand is freedom. That we have effective civil rights legislation.
People have asked me often, what was the thing you remember most about the March on Washington? And I always say the crowd. It was unimaginable to see 200,000 people anywhere at that time. Looking out at that crowd from a small town in Mississippi, I have this kind of feeling that comes up in me. I sense it. awe and pride and so on. It feels a certain way. And I still get it.
I remember thinking very clearly that they support us. They support us.
That's it for this week's America in Pursuit. If you want to hear the full-length episode about Bayard Rustin, check out The Man Behind the March on Washington. And join us next week when we hear directly from journalists during the Vietnam War.
I remember the day after I got there, I was asked to a party. There was roses and champagne and all kinds of wonderful things you'd think you were at home, you know. But then, over the edge of the You could see these flares coming up. And the question was, was it incoming or outgoing? You would never know until it happened.
The Vietnam War. That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Moghadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the ThruLine production team. Music by Ramtin Adablui and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Miner, and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Randa Adel-Fattah. Thanks for listening.
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